Giving Clarity to Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity has been around since 2018 and heatmaps, tracking user behaviour and seeing dead clicks aren’t new, but it is definitely worth paying attention to. This software is a great, and fun, insight into the depth of customer behaviour.

With so many analytical tools available it is hard to listen to them all, but essentially they are all monitoring the same information – who is coming to your website, from where and for how long. One of the things that makes Microsoft Clarity so good to use is that it is visual and can be fun as you can watch screen recordings literally looking at how a user is interacting with that page (it’s a bit spooky too seeing the cursor moving around the page unaided). The great thing about this software is that you can get some really valuable behavioural analytics without pawing through pages of stats. But as with everything, it is how you interpret the findings and what you do with it.

At Gravity we love putting Microsoft Clarity to good use. When a client has a new campaign or product and we have designed their web page – we can see quickly and visually if people are viewing the images and information as we intended – are they finding the right links, are they spending enough time on the page to get the information from it?

There is no doubt that Microsoft Clarity is a powerful analytics tool and if you listen closely enough, you can make your website more engaging just by looking and learning.

So what are the key features of Microsoft Clarity?

Session Replay:

This is definitely the sexiest bit of this software where you can see screen recordings of individual user sessions on a page which is addictive to watch as it tracks the cursor around the webpage. By seeing how people use your site, where they click, and where they get stuck, you can reveal common pain points and areas for improvement.

Heatmaps:

These show visual highlights of user activity on your website and the mapping shows the most frequently clicked areas so you can see popular sections or links. Heatmaps can help you optimise your website’s layout and make data-driven decisions to enhance user engagement.

Behaviour Flow Analysis:

This is a useful, but not original, tool to be able to see a users journey – where they landed, what they did when they got there and where they exited. Looking closely at this data can help identify pages that may have a call to action that people just aren’t actioning and eventually can give a story to help you optimise the structure of your website and keep users engaged.

Click and Scroll Tracking:

Not messing around with fluffy marketing words Clarity refers to lost or ineffective clicks as ‘Rage Clicks’, Dead Clicks’, Excessive Scrolling’ and ‘Quick Backs’ which to be fair, are very descriptive and quite right. But what these give you is an impression of where people get lost, frustrated or just don’t find what they are looking for – the aim is to get them all down to 0%!

Our Thoughts

Microsoft Clarity is a free tool for a deeper understanding of a website – no matter what the size of the business or site. But a little knowledge of data can be distracting, as with any analysis of user behaviour there needs to be a wider understanding of why you want to take a deeper look and what you will do with that information when you have it. If it is just for interest then great, but if you want to use it to improve your website then you have to look at all the factors. User experience is key to engaging with visitors and if you have a well designed and developed website with quality and relevant information, then you have already succeeded.

From a privacy point of view it is also worth noting that although you are following someone’s cursor and what they do with a website, no user data is collected apart from country location, so it isn’t really spying, as it is, Microsoft take privacy very seriously.

Getting started does require a little bit of faffing around though – you have to embed some code onto your website to enable the software to connect and start collecting data. But once this is done, you’re all set and ready to roll.

Give it a go and enjoy!